ACLU, HRW Release Damning Report on Impacts of Drug Criminalization

FEATURING TESS BORDEN – Two major right organizations have just released a damning report on the impact of the war on drugs at the state level. The ACLU and Human Rights Watch together published a nearly 200-page report entitled “Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States.”

That title refers to the fact that an American resident is arrested on average every 25 seconds for drug possession for personal use. We aren’t talking about drug traffickers and sellers. We’re talking about ordinary people using small quantities of drugs like marijuana.

The report also confirmed a long-standing fact that the drug war is severely racialised with African American drug users being four times more likely to arrested for possession than white drug users.

In their report the ACLU and HRW make a strong call for the possession and personal use of drugs to be decriminalized in the US once and for all.

Find the report at www.ACLU.org or www.HRW.org.

Tess Borden, Aryeh Neier Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch and author of the report, Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States.